2024 Chicago International Film Festival Movie Review: Frewaka

Aislinn Clarke’s Fréwaka is a chilling and haunting horror film rooted deeply in Irish folk lore.

Siubhán (Clare Monnelly) — known to her friends as “Shoo”, is a home care nurse who is struggling with the recent death of her mother. She is assigned to the home of Pieg (Bríd Ní Neachtain), an elderly woman who lives in an isolated cabin far away from civilization. Pieg’s home is covered in wards and charms to protect her from the sidhe, a local cult that Pieg made a promise to many years ago and now they have come to collect. Now, Shoo finds herself trying to keep Pieg alive while also trying to decipher what is real and what is the sidhe controlling.

Though pop culture has made fairies into fantastical, nice creatures with wings and magic dust, in Irish folk lore, fairies are serious threats. Fréwaka is a movie about these terrifying creatures as well as looking at Ireland’s dark past with Magdalane Laundries, which were asylums run by Irish Catholic nuns who would beat women living there. Clark’s film is a film the lives and breathes Irish lore, which elevates Fréwaka to something more than just a creepy cult horror movie and makes you want to do more research into what the folk lore after the screening is over.

Fréwaka doesn’t use jump scares and gore to scare us. It uses a meticulous pace that is filled with terrifying imagery and heart-racing tension. Fréwaka is a horror movie for intelligent, patient audiences. Clarke takes her time and focuses on developing her characters and making them as complex as Ireland’s past and also giving us a layered story about familial trauma, hereditary issues, and the sins of our past. Clarke perfectly balances scenes of character development and scenes of horror and never lets up on the tension and lingering mystery of what is actually happening, leading to an unsettling and chilling finale that stuck with me for days.

Fréwaka is a spectacular horror film. It’s a smart, layered cult horror film with sprinkles of haunted house horror films. This is Clarke’s second feature film as a director, and she shows she has the skill to be a new and exciting voice in horror. Her Irish roots shine bright in every scene and her ability to build complex characters and stories along with distressing, eerie scenes of horror have me excited for her future films.

Fréwaka played in the After Dark program of the 2024 Chicago International Film Festival.

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